by Lily Foster
I shift into gear and she points me in the direction we’re heading. “When was that, exactly?”
“Um, early October…Couple of months after you left.”
“Was it your decision? I mean, how did it all come about?”
She looks to me. “Can we hold off on the questions until after we grab some food?” She looks down to her lap, and I notice she’s wringing her hands. “I mean, I’m holding it together but I’m kind of a mess right now…Be prepared for me to start leaking like a faucet once I start talking.”
“Understood.” I want to tell her that my thoughts are running haywire too, but I think she knows as much. “So where do you want to eat?”
“You mind if we just get some take-out? It’s a nice night, we can have a picnic.”
“Ok.”
“It’s just that this is a small town, like microscopic compared to where we grew up. And I’ve always been like a roadside attraction here. And tonight of all nights, I don’t need an audience.”
“Roadside attraction?”
She gestures for me to make a right at the stop sign. “You know, Janelle’s wayward niece…Uppity little thing from down south…Pregnant.” Her voice trails off on that last word, and I don’t know if it’s my place to reassure or comfort her. “Pull in right here. I’ll go inside,” she says, making it clear I’m meant to wait in the truck. She turns back to me with an apologetic look. “It’s just that with you showing up, and Ethan looking like your little mini-me…I can hear the phone lines buzzing already.” As Charlotte hops down from the footboard, she adds, “Sadly, I’m what substitutes for newsworthy around here. It’s the nature of being an outsider in an insular community like this.”
Two guys in their late twenties, maybe early thirties, come out of the shop as she’s going in. They nod and smile at her, one holding the door open and then pausing a full ten seconds just to watch her as she moves inside. Charlotte has no idea. The men trade looks that express appreciation for her form, and smile as they head back to their truck talking. Taking it all in, I’m one hundred percent sure she’s the topic of their conversation. She’s oblivious to the effect she has on people, on men. One thing that hasn’t changed.
“I was going to go with burgers, but then I figured I should give you the full tourist experience. Cudighi sandwiches, a pasty for us to split, and some Trenary Toast for desert.”
“It smells good, so I’ll just trust that you’re not trying to poison me.”
“If I wanted to poison you, you'd be having creamed trout à la Lawrence back at the house.”
I’m so grateful that she’s making things easy, that it’s not strained when we talk, but I’m itching to know things and the mention of Lawrence’s name triggers my need. “Is it all right to ask a question now?”
“Turn left and pull into that area.” Once I put the truck in park, she says, “You want to know who Lawrence is.” Gathering the bags, she hands me two bottles of water. “Come on,” she hops out and calls behind her, “I’ll tell you everything.”
“What a spot.”
It’s a perfect late spring day and the sun is dancing off the ripples on the lake. You can see how crystal clear the water is. It looks like you could cup your hands, take a mouthful, and it would be the best thing you’ve ever tasted.
“I used to come here by myself every day after school that first year, just to sit and think. It’s spectacular, right?”
“You always said you wanted to live by the water.”
“I think I was envisioning a place with water warm enough to swim in. I don’t hate this place, not at all, but it’s unbearably cold and it feels so damn remote up here in the winter. Makes Ann Arbor seem like a tropical paradise.”
She opens the containers and breaks a beef patty apart, handing me one half. “This is a pasty.” She pronounces it past-ee. When I go to take a bite, she leans back on her hands, her own food forgotten. “So Lawrence was Janelle’s boyfriend. He’s lived up here his entire life. Ethan adores him, calls him Paw-paw.”
“Seems like he’s a big help to you.”
“He is. And I think having Ethan around has been a big help for Lawrence too. He took Janelle’s death really hard.”
“I bet you all did.”
She nods. “Even Ethan. I never thought a child so young could grieve, but he spent hours sitting on her bed at our place in Ann Arbor, like he was waiting for her to come home. And he went back to wetting the bed and sucking his thumb. It was heartbreaking to watch.”
“How is he now?”
She smiles, picking at a blade of grass. “Kids are resilient. He talks to her picture sometimes, but it’s not in an unhappy way…More like he’s just telling her about his day. We’re all better. Lawrence and I can talk about her without breaking down. In fact, we make a point of bringing her up at some point just about every day.”
“So she took you in?”
“More like she acquiesced when my dad arranged to dump me on her doorstep.”
She takes a bite of the pasty and then puts it down. “I don’t really care for these. Hand me the bag?” Opening the sac, she hands me a sandwich wrapped in foil and unwraps her own. “Cudighi is an Italian sausage concoction. Much better, if you ask me.”
I want to press, but get the feeling I need to let her go at her own pace. A moment passes before she picks up the thread. “So yeah, I wrote you a few letters when I found out I was pregnant. I was trying to get it right, come up with some right way to tell you. Obviously I never mailed the letters, and my father, who hadn’t taken an interest in my life for nearly a decade, was snooping around my room and found them.”
“Shit.”
“Next thing I knew, Christian was tossing me into his car and dragging me halfway across the universe. And then that was that. I was living with Janelle, a woman I didn’t even know.”
“Did Christian…”
“What?”
I feel my face redden. “I imagine he was angry when he found out, furious if he knew it was me.”
“Yeah, he knew it was you.”
“Did he hurt you?”
“Nothing out of the ordinary.”
I put the sandwich down and run my hands through my hair. “What exactly does that mean?”
“He pushed me, I guess? I can hardly remember. He was the least of my worries back then.”
“You’re so casual about it, make it sound like it’s nothing. You know how it eats at me that I never beat his ass for the times he put his hands on you?”
She twists to look at me. “It’s just how it was. You can’t call the cops when your brother shoves you out of the way or yanks on your ponytail. But I’m not delusional. I don’t think he’s normal or that we had a typical sister brother relationship. He’s not the nicest guy on the planet and my family is dysfunctional…Two things I already know.”
“I always felt like you sugarcoated it for me. You’d lie when I’d ask about the bruises.”
She nods once, slowly. “I didn’t want you getting into it with Christian. He would have made it his mission in life to hurt you in some way. But I swear, it was only squeezing my arm too tight or me knocking into something if he pushed me. It rarely happened and it was never more than that.” She looks back to the water. “And that’s in the past. I’ll probably never see him again in my life.”
“You don’t speak to them?”
She shakes her head. “I went back once, a little over a year ago. I was literally in town for two hours, no more than that. My father never even asked about Ethan. Christian didn’t get off the phone to come over and say hello. It was beyond weird.” She shakes her head like she’s shaking off the memory. “I’ve made peace with it. Janelle and Lawrence made a nice home for me, took care of me the way my mother would have, I think. And thanks to Janelle, I won’t ever need to go back to my father looking for help.”
“Janelle gave you that condo.” She looks surprised. “Public record.”
“Right.” She goes t
o hand me the remainder of her sandwich. “You want this?”
“No.” I say, sitting up straighter. “I’m too hopped up to finish my own.”
“Can I ask you something?”
“Sure.”
“Are you mad at me, Simon? I kind of envisioned this scenario where you’d show up and be really pissed off.” I don’t know what to say to that. “I mean, I knew where you stood back then…I know you wouldn’t have wanted me to go through with the pregnancy.”
I can’t address that directly yet either. “I just remember waking up that last morning we were together and being so disgusted with myself, mad at myself for being so weak.”
She smirks. “And your first though was, ‘Damn, I’d better get to a pharmacy.’”
“Not my finest moment. I’ve replayed that morning over and over in my mind.” I reach over and take both of her hands. “I just want you to know I’m truly sorry for the way I left.”
Charlotte’s lopsided smile does nothing to disguise her pain. “It was a pretty crappy way to leave. The worst.” She slides her hands out of mine and wipes at one eye. “I didn’t even think about what you gave me. I mean, I looked in the bag, but I didn’t actually think to take it.” The next breath she takes is shaky. “A few weeks later, the contents of that bag were all I could think about.”
“I wish I would have known.”
She lets out a cheerless laugh. “Do you? Think back and be serious. Do you really wish I would have told you I was pregnant when you were, what, one month into your freshman year on a full college scholarship?” She starts shoving our trash back into the take-out bag. “I’m glad I didn’t tell you.”
“Hey, wait a minute.”
She shakes her head. “There’s no way to be wrong or right about this. I understand why you wouldn’t have wanted me to go through with a pregnancy at the time. I would have been crazy to suggest it. I know it would have been a disaster. I know that.” She takes a deep breath. “You never lied to me. I knew you were leaving. Those months after you left were so hard, but in the end I decided that I couldn’t get rid of our baby or hand him over to someone else to raise. And to keep him, I knew I had to let you go.”
“Did you hate me?”
“Sometimes,” she says without hesitation. “Sometimes I’d catch a person looking at me in a judgmental way, a few times people made comments…I’d feel ashamed and resent you for it. I wasn’t too happy with you when my ankles were swollen or when I’d look in the mirror and see a walrus staring back at me either.” There’s a hint of a smile before she sobers. “But I had a few really bad days...Just scared more than anything.”
“I’d imagine you were scared every day.”
“No.” She shakes her head with authority. “You think you know what scared is until something truly terrifying happens.” She looks up to the sky and lets out a frustrated breath. “The sun’s already setting and I have so much more to tell you.”
“I’m not going anywhere.”
She stares at me for a moment, probably trying to figure out what exactly I mean by that. And I don’t know the logistics, the hows or the whens—I realize it makes no logical sense—but still, I already know I’m going to be where they are, where my son is.
“There’s something you need to know about Ethan. There were complications with the pregnancy and we, he…He had to have surgery while he was still inside of me.”
I feel my breathing slow. “What was the matter?”
“Aortic stenosis. It’s a congenital heart condition where the left ventricle of the heart becomes dilated and basically dysfunctional.”
“And the surgery worked?”
“So far, so good. It’s amazing what they can do now. The surgery can basically alter the outcome of the condition when it’s done very early. The survival rate is pretty dismal for infants when it’s not detected early on.” It takes a minute to register that she’s rubbing my back, making soothing circles, comforting me. “It’s a lot to take in, I know.”
“Tell me how it happened. Everything.”
“Um, ok.” She doesn’t stop rubbing circles on my back as she tells me about the clinic up here, being rushed to the hospital in Ann Arbor, meeting with all the fetal heart specialists, waking up from the surgery, and the long wait to see if he’d be healthy at birth. “The goal is for the balloon catheter they insert to expand the valve, which results in better blood flow, which can give the ventricle the ability to develop in a normal way. When Ethan was born, the doctors felt the size and function of his left ventricle was adequate. So while he’s not entirely out of the woods, the surgery was a success.”
I can’t get the words out at first. I just sit there shaking my head from side to side. “I’m so sorry you went through all of that on your own.”
“I wasn’t alone, I had Janelle.” She takes her hand off my back when she adds, “But I was lonely for you back then.”
Charlotte
It says a lot, the fact that I’m finding it so easy to rattle off the details of Ethan’s surgery and health history. His diagnosis, the surgery, all that time he spent in the NICU? It was devastating, confusing, frightening—the absolute lowest point of my life. But I’d rather go on about it all night than to talk about us, about what’s going on here right now, about how this is going to play out.
I got carried away there for a moment, telling him I’d been lonely for him when I was scared out of my wits in the hospital. And what was I thinking rubbing his back like that? I should have just gone ahead and licked his neck while I was at it.
I scoot away, trying to be subtle about it, leaving a foot or two of space between us. For all I know, Simon is here for the day and that’s it. I’m not going anywhere. I can’t let myself read too much into those words.
When I opened the door to find him standing there with his hands in his pockets, I felt like I was in a time warp, and the feelings I had for him when I was no more than a girl came rushing back. Dressed in black jeans, a worn Cubs t-shirt and beat up Vans, he looked like my Simon, not the impeccably groomed man from his online professional profile. Taking him in, my mind went back to nights in the woods, hot days spent on the bank of the river, stolen moments in his tiny bedroom, crammed in together on his twin bed.
I remind myself that I haven’t been touched by a man in nearly four years. That’s all this is. The one and only date I went on with a guy from my Cognitive Psych class didn’t even end in a goodnight kiss. Gah. Now my mind is on kissing, and I have to hop off this crazy train because there’s a whole lot more than my feelings at stake here. I owe it to Ethan to do this right. I want Simon to be in his life. I’m not going to mess that up by throwing myself at a guy who, for all I know, has moved on. Picturing that blonde’s face does the trick.
I keep talking, careful to keep the conversation in neutral territory. “Ethan still sees his specialists every six months for follow-up care, and all of his regular providers, like his pediatrician, physical therapists, pediatric dentist…they’re all on site too.”
“Has he had any setbacks?”
I nod my head and feel my shoulders sag under the weight of the memory. Last winter was rough. “He had a stubborn respiratory infection last year, and those can be really dangerous for kids like Ethan. He was in the hospital for a few days.” When I see the stricken look on Simon’s face, I feel the need to reassure him. “He’s healthy, he’s doing great. I just have to be careful about exposing him to infections, so I make sure every little nick and cut is cleaned and bandaged, keep him away from anyone who’s sick with a cold, and he has to take antibiotics before dental work or any other procedures as a precautionary measure.”
“Sam—” He stops abruptly, shaking his head. “Is he, uh, small for his age?”
“No.” Why would he ask that? “He was, but now he’s in the fiftieth percentile for height and weight. His doctor is really pleased with his growth rate. And he’s a great eater. He loves fruit, he’ll try any vegetable, he even eats fish.�
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“It’s good to know he’s doing so well.”
“Yeah, between the complications and him being a few weeks premature and all, it was a rough go for a while there. I can still be overly cautious to the point of being neurotic, but I’m getting better.”
“I bet you’re a great mother.”
I can’t accept that compliment from him. It floods me with too much emotion, both good and bad. I keep rattling off facts to keep myself from saying something like: How the hell would you know?
“So yeah, for now he just has to see his cardiologist regularly and there’s a chance he’ll have some restrictions later on, like with contact sports and that kind of thing.”
“Charlotte.”
I get that he wants me to look at him, but it’s hard. It’s so hard to be around someone you’ve been pining for, someone you’ve cried over. He’s been like a ghost haunting my dreams for nearly four years, and now he’s right here sitting beside me. His presence feels massive. His voice, his scent—it’s sensory overload.
“Hey.”
He reaches over and rubs a thumb across my cheek. When did I start crying? It takes everything in me not to turn into his touch. I’m desperate for his affection, even after all this time. But I won’t make a fool of myself, not now. I straighten my posture and reach for a paper napkin to dry my eyes.
“I’m all right.”
“Ok,” he whispers, withdrawing his hand.
He looks up and I follow. It’s getting dark. The night sky is beautiful here. There are no streetlights or lit up buildings to compete with the stars. But nightfall means a new day is coming, and I need to get busy preparing for that day.
“Simon, are you planning to be a father to Ethan in some way?” I start to say, “It’s all right if you—”
He grabs my wrist. “Don’t.” The ensuing silence prompts me to face him. “Don’t give me an out, don’t tell me it’s fine if I just want to meet him and then go on my merry way. There's nothing about walking away from my son that’s all right.” He practically spits fire repeating those last two words back to me. His eyes are stony when he asks, “Do you want me to be in his life?”
